In other words, their net income is down. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the net increase in sales isn't just a temporary scramble to keep income up / items actually being rung up. The truth is this benefit will almost certainly decrease as more knowledgeable and productive servers find jobs elsewhere or find new methods around the system while the remaining lower skilled / productive settle in at the amount their effort is actually worth.

I have doubts this action would produce a net benefit in the long run. (As quality of service decreases.) Its easy to think that the only people stealing are the "lazy and incompetent". In my experience the most skilled "thieves" are also the hardest workers with the most in depth knowledge of the controls the restaurant has in place. They also tend to desire/need/feel they deserve the cash more than the average employee. (and to most extents all three are true) Of course, all of this applies to the tipped employees, non-tipped employees will feel this doubly so though their forms of theft tend to be easier to track / reduce.

Theft in a restaurant setting is a complex issue, there is no magic bullet to stopping it.

When they put in cameras and I start upselling instead of stealing, I need to upsell 20 / .15 (15%, the traditional tip amount) to have my net remain at $120. That means I need to increase the restaurant's gross by $133 to maintain my extra $20 of income. lmakeppleave is arguing that it's easier to steal $20 than to increase the restaurant's gross by the amount needed to make $20 legitimately.

I would equate "surveillance en masse" to be cameras that are constantly watched by the government, tracking me in my daily life even though I have done nothing wrong.

In a legal environment where police need a warrant to compel private shop owners to turn over surveillance footage, an owner who installs cameras and requires warrants (this is key, plenty of people will just bow to any request) is not contributing to what I would consider to be the problem.

Same reason contracts are written down.

Trust is the belief that you don't need to verify.

"Trust but verify" means that people will be able to do bad things, but will be found out afterwards.

In cryptography, you're trusting an entity when you don't verify that it's doing the right thing. Typically, the goal is to minimize or eliminate trust (otherwise attackers can exploit the system).

I think that his point was that a healthy attitude to take on in life is to generally take other people's words as true (thus trust), but to have mechanisms to ensure that (thus verify). The key point is that unless you have specific reasons not to trust them, then you do not set up an antagonistic relationship.

For this to work, both parties must believe that 'trust, but verify' is a valid norm.

His example about contracts is exactly that. Typically, for most 'small things', you could probably just take someone's word for it. But just in case, we're going to sign on it. As I said before, this really only works when both parties accept this as a norm. Examine trying to sign a contract with someone from a culture which places far higher value on personal honor (or however you want to put it). They might get completely insulted that you would not just 'take their word for it'.

That's something of a similar situation with employers vs employees and video surveillance at work. Clearly, most employees -don't- warrant video surveillance, and simply imposing it on them could lead to serious issues (like the culture clash above).

Actually, that's not a mechanism to ensure anything, that's a mechanism to remediate the consequences of failure. Actually ensuring the compliance would, again, require for you to be under close observation.